New Relic issues plug-ins to monitor databases and cloud resources

Developers at startups and, increasingly, enterprises already use New Relic to track the performance of web and mobile applications and servers. On Wednesday New Relic is branching out, providing more than 50 plug-ins for letting customers monitor more of their infrastructure from the same familiar user interface.

By adopting the plugins, customers will be able to keep an eye on the performance of lots of other tools they already use, in one place, said Bjorn Freeman-Benson, vice president of engineering at New Relic.

For starters on this platform, there are plug-ins for CouchDB, F5 Networks, Memcached, Microsoft SQLServer, MySQL, Redis and Riak. Amazon Web Services plug-ins are available, too, said Bjorn Freeman-Benson, New Relic’s vice president of engineering.

New Relic isn’t charging for these plug-ins; it wants developers to work together as a community on making and sharing new plug-ins. Of course, developers are free to roll their own plug-ins, a process New Relic will allow through software-development kits.

“We supply an SDK in Ruby,” Freeman-Benson said. “We have another one in Java. We have a straight API. If you want to write in some other language, like Node, you can call the API directly and juse set up a loop that checks for data from whatever source you’re looking at.”

The application-performance management (APM) space has been busy this year, with funding coming for AppDynamics and AppNeta, not to mention New Relic. Those other guys might well decide to add their own plug-ins for external tools.

More broadly, this sort of aggregation of monitoring of many services makes sense in the cloud age, where startups perform specific tricks as a service, and it’s up to end users to figure out how to integrate them all. At least New Relic wasn’t beaten to the punch here, as it tees up for a 2014 public offering.

It’s not unreasonable to think the plug-ins will come up in conversation when New Relic Founder and CEO Lew Cirne (pictured) sits down with my colleague Barb Darrow and RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady to talk applications at our Structure conference on Thursday.